End of an Era At Bill Graham

Joel Selvin

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, February 6, 2000

The names don't mean anything to the public, but brothers Pete and Bob Barsotti were the face of Bill Graham Presents to the rock world. As stage managers for thousands of shows over the past quarter- century, the Barsottis worked with every rock band that passed through town.

But more than that, the Barsottis came to represent the spirit of the concert production company -- ambitious, proud and resourceful. They were Bill Graham's go-to guys. They made his grand ideas work. They were the engine behind his fabled showmanship. So their recent retirement party at the Warfield Theater was more than just a send- off for a pair of longtime employees; it was the end of something larger.

Long after the 1991 death of Graham, long after his surviving executives negotiated the company's purchase from his estate, and a little more than two years after the company was sold to SFX Entertainment -- part of the corporate takeover of the entire rock concert business -- the Barsottis leave a firm that is nothing like the one they went to work for in the early '70s.

When Pete and Bob Barsotti started working for Graham, BGP was a small company that put on most of its concerts at the perpetually overstuffed Winterland. It was a grubby business.

"These guys were Management 101 because you couldn't take your eyes off them," Grateful Dead road manager Steve Parrish said from the Warfield stage at the retirement party.

But their heyday was also a time when great creativity and unbounded joy were part of the game. Pete Barsotti was responsible for so many of those over-the-top set designs that were a trademark of the Day on the Green concerts -- an English castle for Peter Frampton and Fleetwood Mac, beach bunnies in bikinis carrying surfboards to introduce the Beach Boys.

They had endless enthusiasm for what Pete Barsotti called "adventures in public assemblage." They had assisted their boss on so many projects and dreamed up more than a few themselves, including Pete's grand scheme of the Squaw Valley Music Festival, where the entire audience rode to the show on chair lifts. The Bill Graham family, the uncorporate nomenclature used in those heady post-hippie days, was like Robin Hood and his Merry Men, happily marauding their way through the countryside.

There are five Barsotti brothers. Sons of an East Bay judge, they grew up in Berkeley during the '60s. Pete sang with a rock band, Haymarket Riot, in high school. His younger brother Bob was the first to go to work for Graham, and he got his older brother a job as a security guard during shows.

Pete Barsotti went on to become, in many ways, Graham's most trusted lieutenant. Graham depended on Pete's twinkly-eyed complicity whenever he did anything special. While the often inscrutable younger brother maintained a calm, almost placid demeanor, Pete Barsotti could be mulish, hotheaded and arrogant. He also could be shamelessly sentimental and sweet. Whatever he did, he did with passion. Ironically, it was his mild-mannered brother who got conked on the head in a backstage melee at a 1977 Led Zeppelin concert at the Oakland Coliseum (and who later received a substantial cash apology).

When a Soviet general insulted Pete Barsotti onstage during the peace concert Graham took to Moscow in 1987, the general's bodyguards had to peel Pete's hands off the general's throat. The general went to where brother Bob was watching the soldiers in front of the stage. "You are not so bad," the general told Bob, "but that man backstage is a maniac."

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